Meximum security

By Terry Graves
web posted June 28, 2004
 
Doing time in a Mexican jail is cruel and unusual punishment –
and that's the good news. Decades ago, the Kingston Trio
lamented, "So here we aaaare in the Tijuana Jail," and conditions
have since gone south, so to speak. Even a correspondent for
the National Public Radio's All Things Considered, in whose
comparisons the United States always gets the invidious end of
the stick, wrote, "In many ways, Mexican jails are much worse
[than American]… massively overcrowded and falling apart…
[where c]orruption is rampant…" According to other reports, in
some Mexico jails hard time is done sleeping on hard floors,
sharing the concrete with convicts from aptly-named gangs such
as the Ear Loppers and the Finger Cutters. NPR did note that
the inmates enjoy remarkable freedom within the jails, which
function almost like villages. (Apparently it takes a village to raise
a convict.) But these are villages massively overcrowded with
Ear Loppers and Finger Cutters. Furthermore, NPR continued,
in Mexico, certain crimes carry shorter punishments, such as five
to eight years for a homicide conviction.

Given the brevity of the sentences, it may be just as well that
Mexican jails are hellholes: many who commit crimes in the
United States will serve time in Mexico, if anywhere. A recent
townhall.com column by Terence Jeffrey, "Make Mexico
Extradite Killers," helps explain why this is so. In it Mr. Jeffrey
wrote of an American family whose father, a Los Angeles county
deputy sheriff, was murdered by an illegal alien already wanted
for two attempted murders. The shooter fled to Mexico, as have
more than a dozen others who wounded or killed American
police officers. And they are still there.

Why? The United States' extradition treaty with Mexico, Mr.
Jeffrey went on, permits our southern neighbor "… not to
surrender suspected murderers wanted in the U.S. unless U.S.
prosecutors waive the death penalty…" It gets worse: "…
following a Mexican Supreme Court decision that declared life
imprisonment unconstitutional, Mexico stopped returning
suspects unless U.S. prosecutors waived life sentences, too." It
seems as if Mexico wants the United States to foot the bill for
incarcerating its criminal class – according to Mexican rules.

Mexico is not the only country that has so tidied up its own
criminal justice system that it can spare the time to offer the
United States its expertise. So far these other nations have
presumed only to limit the punishment we mete out to people
who commit crimes in the US. France famously did this in the
case of Ira Einhorn, the Philadelphia hippie guru who murdered
his girlfriend and stashed her body in a trunk in his closet.
Canada retains the option not to extradite suspects facing the
death penalty and often exercises it. In a recent extradition case
before the Canadian Supreme Court, United States v. Burns,
involving suspects wanted by Washington state for a triple
murder, Amnesty International, the International Centre for
Criminal Law & Human Rights, the Criminal Lawyers
Association, the Washington Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers, and the Senate of the Republic of Italy all intervened
on the side of – well, you can guess which side they supported.
(A hint: it was not that of the three murder victims.)

But it is the practices of Mexico that impact on us most,
especially on southern California: Mr. Jeffrey cited one estimate
that in recent years more than 350 violent criminals have fled
from there to Mexico. His solution: "…action from the president
[Bush] aimed at making Mexico unconditionally extradite killers."
It is impossible not to sympathize with the families of victims of
killers now sheltered in a foreign country. It is also impossible to
imagine what action Mr. Jeffrey expects. The ground rules for
extradition are embodied in a treaty, buttressed by a Mexican
Supreme Court decision. The New York Times reported, "The
court, in a 6-to-2 ruling, said a life sentence negated the Mexican
Constitution's provisions for rehabilitation. ‘It would be absurd to
hope to rehabilitate the criminal if there were no chance of his
returning to society,' Justice Roman Palacio wrote for the
majority." Absurd, indeed. Not the decision; to us Madisonian
Americans, it is the Mexican Constitution that is absurd. Now,
this decision may cause some readers to admire the
progressiveness of the Mexican Supreme Court, but before you
reflexively rush to nominate it to succeed Jimmy Carter as a
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, please note that in 1997, as
reported by the Interpress Service, that same Court ruled that
"… forcing a spouse to have sex is not rape but a mere ‘undue
exercise of a right.'"

Perhaps because the concept of rehabilitation is so foreign to
Mexican prisons, Justice Palacio still believes it might work if
ever it is tried. Of course, the Mexican Supreme Court is not
always so fastidious about extradition: as reported approvingly
by the Human Rights Watch, in 2003 the Court used the
principle of "universal jurisdiction" to permit the extradition from
Mexico to Spain of someone wanted for atrocities committed in
Argentina. (Perhaps China will return the favor of all that military
technology we let them have and extradite our felons from
Mexico to face Chinese justice.)
Only slightly more realistically: what about diplomacy and
negotiation, those panaceas urged by people who never so much
as haggle over the price of a used car?

Even presuming for the moment that the Mexican Supreme
Court were to allow its government any wiggle room, just what
must the United States give up so that Mexico will
"unconditionally extradite killers"? Given Mexico's differing
culture and widespread dislike of yanquis, it would expect the
United States to relinquish mucho in the areas of, say,
immigration, trade, and criminal justice. Once relinquished, there
is no guarantee that in practice the new system of extradition
would work any better than the present, replete as it is with
delays and corruption. Indeed, a new extradition treaty, no
matter how much we give up in return for it, would likely
increase the resentment many Mexicans feel toward the United
States and make its administration all the more difficult. And on
our side of the border, Mr. Jeffrey reminded us, "This raises a
U.S. constitutional issue: If killers who flee to Mexico are
guaranteed reduced sentences, killers who don't flee can claim
unequal justice." Indeed, administration of the treaty would be
subject to the vagaries of judges on both sides of the border –
including California's 9th Circuit and those justices of our own
Supreme Court all too willing to look abroad for a rationale of
their decisions. In short, a new treaty would be no guarantee of
justice.

What is the United States to do? Nothing. Well, after a pro
forma request to extradite, almost nothing. If Mexico or some
other nation wishes to attach strings, hawsers, really, to its
extradition of criminals back to the United States, then we should
let that country keep that criminal. Call it Meximum Security. It is
fitting that the culture that helped create a criminal be the one to
deal with him; the host country can imprison the criminal, to sleep
on hard floors next to the Ear Loppers, or turn him loose on its
populace, as it thinks better. No matter which, the criminal is no
longer victimizing Americans, and this, not some abstract notion
of justice, is the ultimate goal.

"Almost nothing"? We should extend statutes of limitations for
whatever time a criminal is in a country that refuses unconditional
extradition. And, to ensure the citizens of these countries realize
the sort of thugs their governments are welcoming to their
neighborhoods, we should set up Internet web sites, in the
respective languages, detailing the offenses, complete with mug
shots and gory crime scene photos. Third, to cut expenses for,
especially, the overloaded California penal system, we should
take fingerprints and DNA samples from convicts who are
nationals of Mexico or some other uncooperative nation and then
deport them to their homelands, which after all claim to be so
much better than the United States at this whole criminal justice
business. This last may sound radical, but it is at worst an "undue
exercise of a right." (Besides, the Senate of the Republic of Italy,
so self-assured that it presumed to advise the supreme court of
Canada, that paragon of niceness, would doubtless be eager to
accept all of our convicts.) We are told that the United States is
not supposed to be the world's cop; it follows that it should not
be the world's jail. Think, too, of all the money we would save –
justice never comes cheap in this country.

We could start this in a small, truly federal way, without any
capital-F Federal action. For example, the Los Angeles County
district attorney could use a tenth of a percent of the money
saved by not futilely pursuing the deputy's killer to put a Spanish-
language web site trumpeting his presence in Mexico. And the
Los Angeles county jail is tantalizingly close to the Mexican
border, under three hours' drive by prisoner-transport bus.

Despite the money saved nationally, it might be argued that this
notion is politically unrealistic, often repeated by those whose
own pet notions assume, say, that humans are purely economic
or purely angelic (or both). If political reality will inevitably quash
this notion, why worry about it? To generalize: if thing called
political reality is so overwhelming, why, then, should not we all
just shut up, hunker down, and await the next election? Of
course, we shall not, intuiting that the way to begin to make a
notion palatable is to present and defend it. Palatable, not
realistic. Politic reality is unrealistic, a random interplay of
fragments of vague, transitory, and contradictory prejudices
bearing little relation to the holder's real moral and material
interests. (This does not include partisan politics; that is purely
economic.) Think not? Take a moment to compare the political
reality in this country on September 10, 2001 with that of two
days later. With that of 2004?

Which of the three was real, if any? Worse, we live in a
prosperous era that leaves too many of us, like the Senate of the
Republic of Italy, with too much time on our hands, more than
enough to mistake our fragmentary thought-bites for philosophy
or compassion. We therefore need to constantly delineate the
realistic from the palatable, and both from the thought-bites; this
requires that we often be "politically unrealistic."

More realistically, it can be argued that our porous borders
would allow free transit of these criminals back into the United
States. This is not an argument against doing "almost nothing"; it
is yet another argument for using some of the money saved to
secure our borders against these criminals.

Not that by now another argument should be necessary.

Terry Graves is an essayist and novelist living near Pittsburgh.
His novel, Rain in Hell, is about original sin without, he hopes,
being another example of it. (c) 2004

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